Animal coronaviruses and coronavirus disease 2019: Lesson for One Health approach

Abstract

Coronaviruses are a group of enveloped, single-stranded, positive-sense RNA viruses which are broadly classified into Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta coronaviruses genera based on the viral genome. Coronavirus was not thought to be a significant problem in humans until the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2002 but infection in animals including pigs, cats, dogs and poultry has been problematic for long. The outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in December 2019 in Wuhan, China drew special attention towards this virus once again. The intermediate host of this novel coronavirus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is yet to be determined, but it has a very close genomic relationship with the bat coronavirus (BatCoV), RaTG13 strain, and the pangolin coronaviruses. As veterinary medicine has long term experience dealing with coronaviruses, this could be helpful in better understanding to detect the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and drive human medicine towards the development of vaccines and antiviral drugs through the collaborative and transdisciplinary approach of One Health.

Keywords

• animal coronaviruses
• covid-19
• one health
• sars-cov-2